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My wife Lois and I spent three weeks in India during late January and early February 2007. During this time we clearly saw God directing and intervening in ways we could never have anticipated. We were one of several teams that worked out of the city of Madurai under the auspices of the joint ShareHim/The Quiet Hour evangelism project.
Lois had participated in two previous evangelistic campaigns in India, and I had participated in one, all of them in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Opposition to Christianity was minimal in Andhra Pradesh—at least in the part where we worked. However, this year we worked in the state of Tamil Nadu, where opposition was much higher. This was largely due to the fact that Tamil Nadu’s anti-conversion laws had been rescinded only about six months prior to our arrival, and resistance to Christianity was still high.
Following the program on our opening night, the village leaders where we had set up the platform and chairs informed our pastors that we would have to find a location in another village the following night. They had given us permission to set up our meeting site in their village, but then opposition from the community built up to the point that they felt they had to ask us to move. This was a Friday, and our pastors did not want to have to take down the platform and set it back up on Sabbath. And in any case, they needed to arrange for new location. They explained our predicament, and the village leaders agreed to allow us to hold the meetings in their village one more night. By Sunday evening the pastors had arranged for a new location on the property of a very kind old gentleman in a different village. They set up the platform on Sunday, and that evening we were able to hold our meetings in the new location.
Car trouble keeps missionaries out of prison
Our meeting place was about an hour’s drive out of the city of Madurai, where we stayed. The afternoon of the third or fourth day, as we were driving to one of our villages to do some visitation, our car sputtered to a stop and the driver (one of our pastors) pulled off to the side of the road. He quickly verified that a fuse had blown. He tried to replace it, but each new fuse simply blew again. He even tried hot-wiring the car, but that only caused smoke to rise from inside the dashboard. Finally, the pastor called for a mechanic to come fix the problem, and he arrange for a taxi to take Lois and me to our meeting place. We felt disappointed at missing an opportunity to visit in the village, but we said that “perhaps someday in heaven we’ll know why God allowed this to happen.”
We didn’t have to wait for heaven!
The very next day the pastors we were working with told us that a group of Hindus who opposed our presence had posted signs all over one of the towns in which we were working that said: “Tamil Nadu Government and Police Department take action against the Christian thieves who have burned the Murugan temple which was in Melu Vadaku Navinipatti! Put them in prison immediately! By all-India Hindu Maha Society, Madurai District.” Had we gone visiting the day before, we might have run into serious opposition.
Threats and power cuts
God also intervened in a marked way during the meetings themselves. On the second or third night, a man came shouting and running through the crowd toward the platform where I was speaking, demanding that our meeting be shut down. However, our pastors discerned that he was drunk, and they escorted him away from the people.
I was using a PowerPoint sermon series that projected images and text onto the screen in the Tamil language. On several occasions I was almost unable to use the PowerPoint. One night, the lights went out about half an hour before I was scheduled to begin preaching. Our pastors quickly learned that some Hindus who opposed our meetings had cut the electricity to the entire village where our meetings were being held. They excused this on the premise that they had to cut the power in order to do some electrical repair work on a nearby Hindu shrine. Our pastors immediately went to the work site, and by the time I stood up to speak they had persuaded the Hindus to turn lights back on.
Prayer holds off torrential rain
Another time, the weather was very threatening as we came to the meeting site, and we half expected to get rained out that night. Some of the other teams in our ShareHim group were forced to shut down for the evening because of rain, but not a drop of rain fell clear up till the time I quit preaching. But within half a minute after I closed the meeting with prayer, the rain began to fall!
God powers computer during meeting
On a third occasion, everything progressed normally. I finished my sermon on time, and at the close I bowed my head for prayer. When I looked up, both the screen on my computer monitor and the screen the people were looking at were dark. Checking to see why, I discovered that my power cable had disconnected part way through the sermon, and the computer had been operating on battery power for at least half an hour and I hadn’t realized it. I believe God kept that computer “alive” until I finished my topic for the evening.
 Lois was also using PowerPoint for her health talks, and two or three times she had to make do without the projected images, but the PowerPoint projector always came back on in time for me to preach my sermon. Not once during the entire three weeks did we have to cancel or cut short one of our meetings for weather, electrical problems, or opposition from the local Hindu community.
425 new siblings in Christ, plus new church
At the conclusion of the series we rejoiced that 375 people were baptized, and since returning to the United States we have learned of another 50 who were baptized. We praise God for these precious souls, whom we are planning to meet around God’s throne someday.
The cost for conducting this evangelistic series for five villages was $7,000 per village. This included the cost for constructing a church in each of the villages. We are grateful to The Quiet Hour for assisting us with the $7,000 for one of these villages.
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